Dealing With Heterogeneous Information in Multi-Criteria Group Decision-Making Problems: A Comprehensive Design Framework

This study provides a comprehensive review of the literature on group decision-making with heterogeneous information, aiming to map the main characteristics in this field, pointing out gaps, and suggesting new promising approaches and methods to overcome current limitations. The research reveals the main research front directions, key authors, most common application areas, the most frequently used preference formats, and aggregation schemes in the existing studies are discussed. The research innovation and originality lie in developing five new approaches and methods to overcome the identified gaps and limitations. First, a transparent, comprehensive, and intuitive framework for dealing with heterogeneous information in multi-criteria group decision problems is proposed. Second, a standardization scheme is introduced to define the name of the preference format when it has many names and establish a standard naming structure for all formats. Third, an easy-to-follow framework for categorizing existing and new formats to facilitate understanding the structure of each format is studied. Fourth, the new “relational ordered preference” is introduced, a format that increases agility and accuracy in alternative assessments. Fifth, we introduce a pioneering aggregation scheme (consensus-based ordered weighted averaging operator) to maximize the consensus level between individual and collective assessments. An illustrative and a real-world example are also provided. The example of the governance composite indicator shows that relational ordered preference increases the accuracy of assessments and, consequently, the degree of consensus. In turn, the consensus-based approach achieved higher degrees of consensus than extreme value reductions, indicating that preserving more convergent opinions contributes more to consensus than preserving intermediate opinions.